Item placement files, usually identified by the file extension .ipl, are a part of the map system and used to create and place (for example) different objects, zones of special behaviour or paths in the world. All games support standard item placement files which are mostly stored in plain text format that can be opened and edited using any text-editing program (like Notepad), but there are tools to simplify editing. San Andreas is the first game to introduce a binary format for item placement files. Most of the placement information in GTA IV is stored inside of binary files (see WPL).

Contents

Overview

The structure and format of the plain text item placement files are similar to that of the item definition files.

Binary format

San Andreas introduced an simple binary format of item placement files. They are stored as "streaming files" inside the archive files. Editing them requires an special editor (see below). The format is pretty simple and their possibilities are not completely used by Rockstar. By default they do only support inst and cars sections. It is unconfirmed if other sections also can be used or if they are just stubs which are not implemented. Anyway their binary format is completely unknown.

The header is followed by the arrays of the entries. For more information about their format see the articles about the sections.

Format

The following table contains all known sections in the item placement. The supported games column lists games that support the sections but it doesn't necessarily means they're functional in the games.

Creates waypoints for random NPC spawns.Note: this section is also present in San Andreas and GTA IV. It is used as a base for Rockstar's paths compiler, but gets ignored by the games. For more information see: Paths.